The silliest TV soap ever!
Wobbly sets, ludicrous plots, awful acting ... but 50 years after its launch, fans are still devoted to Crossroads
The sets were famously wobbly, the characters notoriously flaky and the stories lurched from the unlikely to the downright bizarre. But the millions of viewers who checked in every weekday at the Crossroads motel for their five-times-a-week teatime fix couldn’t have cared less. they loved every shambolic moment of it — fluffed lines, mistakes and all.
Launched to fill a gap in the schedules 50 years ago, Crossroads ran for almost 5,000 episodes. Its first incarnation lasted until 1988, and it was revived — disastrously — for two years in 2001.
At its peak in the seventies, it pulled in 18 million viewers and was second only to Coronation street. Its stars won viewers’ polls and showbiz awards.
however, not everyone was so enthralled. ItV’s regulator, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, twice ordered it to cut its output, first to four, then three, episodes a week to improve its quality. the chairman, Lady Plowden, lamented that Crossroads was ‘distressingly popular’.
It is, however, sadly missed these days, not least by its stars. Jane Asher, who played the motel’s owner (and archbitch and sexual predator) Angel samson, in the revived version, says she loved every minute of it.
so much so, that she even posed in a bath of bubbles and discreetly placed rose petals, while sipping from a glass of Champagne to promote her motel.
‘It was an iconic soap and greatly under-appreciated’, she insists. ‘I watched the original as a teenager, and could easily have got hooked on it. But I was more a fan of the Archers on the radio. But by the second time around the show had really had its day’.
Crossroads first opened its doors in November 1964 — set in the fictional King’s Oak, Birmingham, and charging guests £4 a night for each of its 18 rooms.
the show, with the formidable Noele Gordon as the motel’s matriarch, Meg Richardson, was scheduled to run for 30 episodes over six weeks. It was an immediate hit with viewers in spite of its visibly cheap production values.
the budget was reported to be only £10,000 for an entire week’s five episodes, compared with the same amount spent on each episode of rival Coronation street. the sets had been constructed out of flimsy canvas and board because they had never been meant to last for long. the highest-paid star was Gordon, whose salary was reportedly £200 a week. some minor characters were persuaded to work for £10 an episode on the grounds that the show would be good exposure for them.
With such a demanding schedule, there was little time for scripts to be rewritten and polished, still less for rehearsal, so everything had to be filmed in one take. the expense of editing out mistakes was so great, given the tiny budget, that the producers ordered them to be left in.
Jane Rossington, who was in the show for 24 years as Meg’s daughter, Jill, has the distinction of speaking the very first words in the opening episode, and the final words in the last, and remembers how many bloopers crept in.
she recalls: ‘Noele would sometimes call me Jane, on camera, rather than by my character name, Jill, but there was no time or budget for re-takes. “Oh, no one will notice”, she’d insist.
‘I loved her, but she did speak her lines very slowly and sometimes I
would wonder if she was ever going to finish a sentence!’ The story lines were equally erratic. Jill had an on- screen pregnancy that went on for over a year — and, to the shock of viewers, the father was her screen stepbrother. But after the baby was born, it was never mentioned again. The script called for her to marry three times — once bigamously — and to become a drug addict and an alcoholic. Everything that could happen to a person happened to me’, she says, ‘ but it was all terrific fun’. TV critics sneered — ‘amateurish pap,’ said one — but the show attracted view-ers of all ages and a huge fan base. Indeed, the more absurd the plots became, the more they lapped it up. Meg survived regular murder attempts. Motel Lothario Adam Chance Tony Adams) would try to seduce most of the female guests. Various members of the staff would go berserk with pots and pans and one of them, cleaner Amy Turtle (Ann George), was briefly arrested as a Russian spy named Ame-lia Turtlovski. Characters disappeared for months on end with little explanation. Chef Shugghie Mcfee (Angus Lennie) went behind the fridge for some ingredients and was gone for the rest of the year. Deke Arlon, who played coffee-bar boss Benny Wilmott, was told by Meg to get some sugar. He exited the kitchen and was never seen again. Dim-witted handy-man Benny Hawkins (Paul Henry), rarely seen without his iconic blue beanie, once went out for a spanner and returned six months later. He was beset with a litany of troubles: falsely accused of murderi-ng his gipsy fiancee Maureen — killed on the morning of their wedding - he was then temporarily blinded and lost his best friend, Miss Diane, the manager (Sue Hanson), when she died brain haemorrhage. He subsequen-tly commemorated her by of a naming et donkey after her. Mottel manager David Hunter, played by Ronald Allen, was an incurable gam-bler for just one week in 1977, his son Chris was a part-time terrorist and his ex-wife Rosemary shot him. But motel boss Meg had more than most to endure. One husband tried to kill her by painting the living room with poisonous emulsion and she lost another to a heart attack.
Then viewers thought they’d lost her in a huge explosion at the motel. The big bang allowed them to start with a new set and motel, but Meg’s days were numbered. She was sacked in 1981, despite thousands of protests, including a petition from a Hell’s Angels chapter . In the story, she sailed off into retirement on an Australiabound QE2.
In reality , s he believed she had become the victim of TV politics: The network’s bosses were said to want to ditch what they deemed t o be downmarket shows like Crossroads in f avour of ‘ quality drama’. Without the soap’s most popular star, the show would lose viewers and thus give them an excuse to drop it, which is what happened.
Another character who was to come to a real untimely end was Meg’s son, Sandy, played by Roger Tonge. He had intrigued viewers by apparently never growing any taller during his 17 years in the show, and retaining a perpetually breaking voice. The height problem was resolved when scriptwriters invented a car crash which obliged Sandy to spend the rest of his time at the motel in a wheelchair . In a case of life imitating art, Tonge really became confined to a wheelchair when he contracted Hodgkin’s Disease. He died aged 35 i n 1981 — and Sandy was never mentioned again. Virtually anyone who appeared in the series automatically became the victim of some scriptwriter-inspired mishap within six months. There were poisonings, rapes, drug addiction, incest, abortions, nervous breakdowns, kidnapping and even the bomb which blew up the motel.
That didn’t stop soon-to -be famous faces making brief appearances in the motel lobby. David Jason made his TV debut in Crossroads in 1966 as a crook; Elaine Paige checked in as a guest; and Malcolm McDowell was public relations consultant Crispin Ryder in 1965.
Ken Dodd played himself in 1973, Larry Grayson attended a wedding in 1973, Max Wall checked in in 1982, and Dad’s Army veteran Arnold Ridley (Private Godfrey) was a vicar at the motel opening ceremony in 1964.
The £10 million revamp in 2001 was bereft of many of the touchstones of the original, like the imperious Meg , or sad Sandy.
Some of the original cast couldn ’t reprise their roles because they had succumbed to can - cer: Noele Gordon, in 1985; Roland Allen (David Hunter) in 1991; Ann George (Amy Turtle) in 1989; and Pamela Vezey, who played K ath Brownlow, in 1992.
And if the original cast was scarce, so, too, were many of the quirks that used to make it so endearingly popular.
The sets no longer wobbled, the actors were better rehearsed and remembered their lines; and there was sex.
‘It was all great fun,’ laughs Jane Asher. ‘My character, Angel, was a real super bitch, deeply unpleasant to her staff and her children, ruthlessly ambitious and very glamorous. There was a lot of sex — we would all be exhausted if we had that much sex in real life — but we were quite discreet. It NOT did go out at 5.30pm’.
all the cast were happy about the adult content. Kathy Staff, who played cleaner Doris Luke in both the original series and the revival, left in dismay at the raunchy sex scenes. ‘It ’s no longer a familyfriendly show,’ she complained.
She needn’t have worried. Viewing figures slumped to below 1.4 million, and after two years the revival was axed.
Says Asher: ‘There were rumours that the company wanted to sell the studios in Nottingham where Crossroads was filmed. Whatever the reason, we were surprised they didn ’t give it enough time to build up a following.
‘My character was very glitzy and over the top. I didn ’t have any input to the stories. I’d like to make that quite clear. They weren’t the most subtle of scripts, I have to say’.
That’s one way of putting it. Another would be that Crosswords was the best worst TV show Britain has ever made. But despite it all, the show has lived on to enjoy a continuing repeat life on extra-terrestrial TV.
However, the final indignity for the fictional motel is the derisory fees paid by the satellite channels for the re - showings: £1.25 per episode.